‘Earthlings in Love’ Review: A Sentimental Sci-fi Journey Makes the Leap from TikTok to the Tokyo International Film Festival

“One Cut of the Dead” director Shinichiro Ueda helms a project that’s better than a “vertical drama” has any right to be.

It’s a queasy proposition for cinephiles: Take a TikTok series, retrofit it into a feature film, and premiere it at a major international film festival. But that’s exactly what happened with “Earthlings in Love,” the latest project from Japanese director Shinichiro Ueda. It’s the first so-called “microdrama” (also known as a “vertical drama”) to premiere at the Tokyo International Film Festival, an unusual choice given that in Japan, as abroad, these short-form videos are designed for casual viewing on smartphones, not the formal atmosphere of a film festival. “Earthlings in Love” was originally released in 30 parts on social media, then recut for its TIFF debut; this version is significantly longer, going from a 76-minute runtime to an 102-minute one. It’s also — and this is crucial — much better than anyone might expect, given its provenance.

It’s not terribly surprising that Ueda in particular would be open-minded about working in a new media format: His “One Cut of the Dead” broke out internationally in large part because of its ingenious approach to low-budget storytelling. “Earthlings in Love” is similar in that it takes its limitations and turns them into strengths, thoughtfully incorporating the vertical-video format both into the film’s mise en scene and its structure. It would be disingenuous to say that you forget about the vertical framing after a while — I certainly didn’t — but Ueda makes the most of the tight 9:16 aspect ratio, shooting dialogue scenes from the waist up and composing shots so that they move the eye upwards rather than across the frame.

Even more clever is the way that Ueda, who also wrote the script, incorporates the feeling of claustrophobic disconnection into the story itself. This is a movie about selective memory, centered on a fortysomething film director named Shinpei (Kato Shinsuke) whose career has been prematurely halted by early-onset dementia. Returning to his hometown for the funeral of a former classmate, Shinpei tries to recall why he and his friends never finished their zero-budget high-school sci-fi opus, “Earthlings in Love.” Shinpei remembers a dramatic classmate quitting the shoot because he felt the movie was beneath him, and his secret crush encouraging him to keep going. But is that what really happened?

That’s what we see in the first 20 minutes or so of the movie, as Ueda blends “Rashomon” with “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” by having Shinpei consult a service that offers to recover his fading memories by feeding photos and diary entries into an AI-generated recreation of his own past. As we find out, the AI is reflecting Shinpei’s own faulty recollections back to him; Ueda insists that this isn’t a commentary on AI per se, but it does bring to mind the way that LLMs create feedback loops that have led to the pop-psychological phenomenon of AI psychosis. Luckily for him, Shinpei has Nagisa (Kiyose Yaeko), another former classmate with whom he reconnected on his trip back home, to keep him grounded in the present. Her role in Shinpei’s life is unclear at first, not least because he keeps forgetting where he knows her from. Over time, however, she becomes the story’s most tragic figure.

As with “One Cut,” the plot structure of “Earthlings in Love” is built on a series of dramatic twists. This is where Ueda puts the “microdrama” format to its most ingenious use, revisiting moments we’ve already seen from new perspectives that reveal important pieces of information previously left out of the frame. Simply by panning a few feet left or right, Ueda can completely change the narrative and emotional stakes of the film. And the way he applies this technique feels fresh and genuinely innovative, not to mention organic to a potentially offputting new style of storytelling.

The story itself is not as fresh, leaning on themes of high-school nostalgia and missed connections that are common in Japanese popular cinema. However, they’re given an earnest, if sometimes overly sentimental, airing here thanks to Ueda’s personal connection to the material. The director has not been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, but he was a prolific amateur filmmaker beginning in junior high, and the flashback scenes of “Earthlings in Love” are set in the year 2000, when Ueda was a sophomore in high school. The fact that this ‘00s nostalgia piece was made via a very 2020s model of filmmaking is just further evidence of Udea’s casual formal brilliance.

These scenes are not the only ones that ring true, however, as Kato and Kyose successfully carry the plot through outrageous coincidence and into three-hanky tearjerking. “Earthlings in Love” aches for a lot of things, chief among them the simple joy of creating something with your friends just for the fun of it. Its core message is ironic, given the disposable nature of its initial release: Human memories fade, but movies are forever. Now that it’s a proper film, its lifespan has a better chance of being extended.

Grade: B+

“Earthlings in Love” premiered at the 2026 Tokyo International Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.